Bartholomä Herder

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Bartholomä Herder

Bartholomä Herder (born August 22, 1774 in Rottweil ; † March 11, 1839 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; also: Bartholomäus Herder ) was the founder of the publishing house named after him .

Life

School bookseller in Rottweil

Bartholomä Herder, born in 1774 in the Swabian town of Rottweil , was the founder of Herder Verlag, which is still based in Freiburg today . Intended by his parents for the spiritual profession, he already came up with the plan as a student of the monastery school of the Benedictine monastery of St. Blasien and then as a student of philosophy at the University of Dillingen , probably because he had had negative experiences, the plan to "become a learned bookseller, to intervene in life through the distribution of good writings through the book trade ”.

As a result, he opened a school bookshop in Rottweil, together with his brother Andrä, and a printing company in partnership with Johann Nepomuk Spreng. In response to this, he asked the city council to be allowed to marry the honorable bourgeois daughter and virgin Johanna Burkardthin. The city council approved this request, but refused, still completely caught up in guild thinking - Herder had not completed an apprenticeship as a printer - from his request to set up his own printing shop.

In the service of the Prince-Bishop of Constance

Then the 26-year-old had enough of the merchant spirit of his hometown and in 1800 he sent the Prince-Bishop of Constance, Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a memo: How the book trade could have the most influential effect on the education of the clergy and the school system . Herder strives to "spread the love of literature among the clergy and to bring good writings to the people".

Von Dalberg, for his part, wanted to improve the education of the clergy "in order to counteract the moral wilderness as well as the one-sided and therefore dangerous intellectual culture in an effective way". At the same time, the clergy should be enabled “to bear the burden of hardships more easily and happily, which are inseparable from the profession and office of clergy”.

Herder's request came at the right moment; Dalberg was so impressed that he noted on the margin that "instead of a court bookkeeper in the seminarium, he should set up a book printing and publishing house ... as a source of secondary income". In November 1801, for example, he ordered the young Herder to come to his residence in Meersburg as court bookseller, "to set up a printing press there and to combine the book trade with it". As editor at the prince-bishop's court, the Herder-Verlag's first publications were naturally religious in nature, such as Wessenberg's archive for pastoral conferences in the country chapters of the diocese of Constanz , which appeared in monthly issues from 1802 to 1827.

It was a turbulent time. Napoleon had driven the Habsburgs out of northern Italy with his victory at Marengo in 1800 and incorporated all of the German territories on the left bank of the Rhine into France in the Treaty of Lunéville . Von Dalberg, Prince-Bishop of Mainz since 1802, had Herder anonymously print a pamphlet on the question of the pending compensation of the German princes deposed west of the Rhine , but the paper was wasted before it appeared. In the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, in the course of secularization, the Archdiocese of Mainz was dissolved; the Meersburg residence fell to the margraviate of Baden together with the states of the bishopric of Constance . With that, Herder lost a substantial part of his livelihood.

Herder Verlag relocates to Freiburg

In 1808, Herder moved to Freiburg , which in 1805, after Austria's devastating defeat at Austerlitz in the Third Coalition War, was owned by the Habsburgs, together with the Breisgau, in Baden, which had since been promoted to the Grand Duchy. In Freiburg there was already the privileged city bookstore Wagner at that time, but the university was interested in a publisher "for the needs of higher studies". In the grand-ducal approval for the Herders branch in Freiburg as an academic bookseller, it was necessary to “renounce the printing trade and the sale of normal and trivial school books”. For Herder, however, the publishing house, printing and book trade were inseparable and so he rented the university's book and copperplate printing works for 200 Rhenish guilders, which came from the St. Blasien monastery and which the Grand Duke had given to the Freiburg University after its abolition.

Herder quickly expanded his publishing house by bringing out historical works in addition to religious writings in the new environment of the university. In 1810, JA Mertens History of the Germans from the Earliest Periods to 1800 and 1811 appeared in the four-volume work by JG von Pahl Herda , which contained stories and paintings from prehistoric German times for friends of patriotic history.

During the Napoleonic period, booksellers were held in high esteem by the upper classes of the bourgeoisie, because with them you could see the rare and expensive books and magazines. A far more pleasant way of reading, however, was offered by the so-called reading societies , which, in order to satisfy the citizens' hunger for education, were formed all over Germany at the same time. When Herder came to Freiburg, the Baden court commissioner Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Friedrich Drais Freiherr von Sauerbronn , the poet Johann Georg Jacobi and the constitutional lawyer Karl von Rotteck had founded the Freiburg Reading Society there the year before . This was strongly supported by Herder, in that he put new publications out for viewing "in order to relieve potential buyers of the inconvenience of being deceived either by promising titles or by partial reviews of the value of the books".

As a publisher, Herder constantly expanded his range, although synergetic effects were inevitable when he published the nine-volume general history from the beginning of historical knowledge to our times of his friend and reading society member Karl von Rottecks between 1812 and 1827 . The work became the gospel for an entire generation of the educated and liberal bourgeoisie and was published fourteen times by 1840.

As a publisher in the war of liberation

In 1813, Herder received the order from the Allied headquarters to continue the " Teutsche Blätter" , as it has been published by Herr Brockhaus in Altenburg and Leipzig, with the condition, however, that it is subject to the Imperial and Royal Austrian censorship as before to have". When, accompanied by Metternich, he moved into Paris with the invading army against Napoleon as director of the royal-imperial field press in 1815, Herder found himself in the middle of current affairs. He also took on diplomatic tasks at the local peace negotiations and later at the Congress of Vienna . In addition, he did not neglect his entrepreneurial activity and founded publishing companies in the two capitals. In addition, in 1817 he acquired the court printing house in Karlsruhe and with it the publishing house of the Badisches Regierungsblatt.

Foundation of an "art institute" in Freiburg

After the First Peace of Paris, Herder met the increasing demand in the printing industry for lithographers , steel and copper engravers by founding an art institute in Freiburg. In a letter to the Baden Ministry of the Interior, the publisher boasted:

“The encouraging applause from the domestic and foreign public, which favored this company, prompted the expansion of my institute, in which I hired skilful draftsmen and engravers, and by accepting poor but capable boys from different parts of the Black Forest, I got my own pupils who I am continuously teaching the necessary sciences at my own expense. "

At a time when the social hardship in the Black Forest was particularly great, Herder had 15 and 16-year-old young men trained as draftsmen and engravers and granted them board and lodging. Over 300 students left the Freiburg school over the years. Most famous were Franz Xaver Winterhalter and his brother Hermann Winterhalter . Herder himself also benefited from his facility when he brought out the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, each represented in 100 biblical coppers, in his new publishing company, Herdersche Buch- und Kunsthandlung . Between 1825 and 1827 a systematic picture gallery for the General German Real Encyclopedia was created with around 4000 images on 226 lithographic plates. This picture gallery was an addition to the well-known conversational encyclopedias, the Brockhaus and Meyer , which were not illustrated at the time , and saw six editions and a translation into French by 1839. Instead of a conversation lexicon, the publisher brought out the state lexicon of the Görres Society and, in keeping with the Catholic tradition of Buchberger's Lexicon for Theology and Church . The well-known Herdersche Conversationslexikon in an edition without illustrations in five volumes did not appear until 1854 under the sons of Herder.

Efforts to cartography

During his travels to Paris and Vienna, Herder got to know the excellent products of French cartography, which had contributed to the success of the Napoleonic campaigns. Around 1820 he attached a geographic-topographical department to the cultural institute with the gigantic task of publishing a general atlas of the whole world in 30 and an atlas of Europe in 100 to 204 sheets on a scale of 1: 500,000. For a better overview of the maps - place names and streets were printed in red - Herder dared to do a two-color lithograph. The investment and workload of the project exceeded the publisher's capabilities and there were delays in the delivery of the map sheets. The company's costs threatened to get out of hand. Herder received a government contract in dire need. As part of the regulation of the Rhine from Basel to Mannheim, this included a Rheingränz-Carte in 19 sheets on a scale of 1: 20,000.

But the financial situation remained tense. Herder hoped for government support and sent samples of his work to both chambers of the Baden state parliament. So it came to a recommendation of the MP Karl von Rotteck "with the general wish" of his colleagues to the Baden government "perhaps they would like to recognize the most benevolent to the state, which were founded by some private citizen in our country, with their own support". Herder was awarded a medal and was commissioned to publish the state and government gazette for a period of twelve years, but there was no direct financial contribution. Under these circumstances, the finally completed Woerls Atlas of Central-Europa in 60 sheets on a scale of 1: 500,000 and the atlas of Southwest Germany, also drawn by Professor Wörl, with 48 sheets were a great achievement. Still in the wars of 1859, 1864, 1866 and in 1870/71 these exact maps must have been of great help, because “in April 1871 over 200,000 sheets from France and more than 400,000 copies of the plan of Paris are delivered”.

The Heritage

At the death of Bartholomäus Herder in 1839, the publishing house was characterized by a wide-ranging program that went far beyond the original religious focus. Herder's grave and that of his wife Jeannette are in Freiburg in the old cemetery. The sons Karl Rafael and Benjamin led the company and their descendants continue the work of the founder to this day.

literature

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hanns Bücker: Bartholomä Herder, 1774–1839. Publisher - Printer - Bookseller . Herder, Freiburg 1989, ISBN 3-451-21534-9 , quotation p. 17.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Herder, Bartholomä
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Herder, Bartholomäus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1774
PLACE OF BIRTH Rottweil
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1839
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau